TMBA 315: Talking Smart Drugs

Many entrepreneurs have dabbled with “smart drugs”, also known as “cognitive enhancers” or “nootropics” but few have studied them as closely as Jesse Lawler. In his weekly podcast Smart Drugs Smarts, Jesse talks to range of specialists and academics about different aspects of brain chemistry, including the effects of smart drugs.

In this week’s TMBA episode, Jesse shares what he’s learned about the effects of Smart Drugs, things to consider when using them, and their appeal for all ages.

Dan:(laughs) But before you get too excited, we’re not talking about the recreational type.

Ian: Oh.

Dan: Over the last decade, this concept of Nootropics and ‘smart drugs’ has really taken off,
especially in the entrepreneurial community. Of course, I’m sure you knew about this as a student.

Ian: Oh yeah.

Dan: And this is nothing new. A lot of terrible books have been on “nootropics” but there is a lot of interesting movement in this world. I’ve taken some nootropics in the past, I have some experiences which I’ll share on this show. Have you taken any nootropics?

Ian: Yes, I have taken them. I have spun out of control, I have stayed in control every once in a while but

Dan: In this show Ian we’re not going to talk about mine, yours.

Ian: We can’t go to jail again.

Dan: We can’t go back to jail. So instead we’ve invited Jesse Lawler. Those of you are long term listeners to the show will know that Jesse used to be our business partner, runs the podcast ‘Smart Drugs Smarts’ which is fabulous. I mean he interviews all different types of people from scientists and it’s a really fascinating show if you’re interested in anything interesting about cognitive performance and cognitive health. He gave a great presentation on this topic at our event in Bangkok and we’re going to bring a lot of that to this show here today and part of the reason is that our producer Jane attended the conference and so a lot of this – we’ll weigh in few times but most of what you’re going to hear today is our producer Jane interviewing Jesse.

Ian: You Dan when I think about what’s interesting about this topic – I think that Jesse is really on the forefront. People that are studying these things are on the forefront of what it’s going to be like in the future to take a performance enhancing drug that helps you become smarter. I think we’re just getting started here. See this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is going to be possible in the future.

Dan: Yeah no question you see that in – the military hands these things out to people who need to perform, like fighter pilots and a lot of the things that have been developed for one purpose like Alzheimer’s patients end up having a lot of benefits for the rest of us.

Ian: You need to stay up all night perched on hill with your sniper rifle, now you can take this drug to finish your website on time.

Dan: In this episode you can expect to hear: when is when isn’t the best time to take advantage of nootropics, if you’re planning to. So Jesse has a lot of experience – not only from his audience but from self-testing. And he’ll share some of that. And Jesse has people in their 80s listening to his show, so it’s not all young people who are interested in this stuff. And how he thinks cognitive enhancement aids might develop in the future. But to start Jane asked Jesse Lawler about what ‘smart drugs’ actually means:

Jesse: Smart drugs is an umbrella term that doesn’t necessarily corresponds to an exact type of chemical. The chemicals that are included under the smart drug umbrella aren’t necessarily of a chemical ‘family’ with one another. There are lots of different mechanisms of action that these drugs do as far as what they’re actually doing in the brain, promoting the release or the restricted uptake of certain neurotransmitters. For example, two of the well-known drugs that people think about under the smart drugs umbrella are Ritalin and Adderall both of which are stimulants and have huge effects on the amount of Dopamine that’s allowed to circulate within the brain.

So, those ones are well known for getting people’s hyperfocus. It makes whatever you’re doing very, very interesting to you if you’re using them as the classic use – you need to do your term paper in two nights because you’ve been putting it off all term and somebody takes an Adderall and is able to sit down and read those six textbook chapters that they’ve been putting off forever and it seems like it’s the most exciting thing in the world. That would be one example ..

Jane: I think a lot of people will have heard of them as drugs to treat young people who have Attention Deficit Disorder, is that right?

Jesse: Yeah. That brings up an interesting point of almost everything that’s considered a smart drug was first discovered and put to use and is often times gotten approval by the Food and Drug Administration for something else. Those two that we just mentioned are prescribed as drugs to treat ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Similarly, another fairly well-known thing that’s considered under the smart drugs umbrella is Modafinil and some kinda ‘siblings’ of that drug, all of which are used on, technically, for narcolepsy, when people fall asleep without warning.

It’s one of these things where the prescribed use is not really how it’s getting used in the real world. There are a lot of other drugs in the Racetam family which is a fairly famous chemical compound family within the world of smart drugs. These are generally used to enhance memory and be a neuroprotective later in life as people are perhaps beginning to show signs of Alzheimer’s or senior dementia. But as they’ve done test seeing whether these drugs have effects on the brains of younger people, they don’t have quite as profound of effects if a brain is still functioning well but they can still have some significant effects even for people as young as college age.

Jane: Sorry, I interrupted you there. Let’s continue with the other types of drugs.

Jesse: There’s just a variety. There are focus enhancing, as I said, oftentimes are working on the Dopamine system. There are purely wakefulness-enhancing drugs. This might be something like caffeine is obviously something that falls under the smart drugs umbrella that’s been available widely forever and that everybody is probably pretty familiar with and is an easy entry into even thinking about these things. There’s some drugs that affect mood. I’m not talking like anti-depressive drugs or the Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor things but one of the things I mentioned in the speech was a plant called Lemon Balm which has been around forever. I think you can buy in ‘Whole Foods Market’ and things like that.

It has showed to have some light cognitive-enhancing effects but most people agree that it definitely does have some mood-enhancing effects for people. Creativity, I mentioned the Racetams a bit earlier. I like to take one called Aniracetam for creativity enhancement. I think the reason that I find that particular effect is because the Racetams are known for increasing the person’s working memory. It’s my belief that when you have ideas available to you simultaneously because there’s more ideas you can hold in your head for working memory, you’re able to just hold ideas against one another, winds up having greater creative output.

Jane: You obviously have quite a lot of experience taking them. Can you just give me some description about how long you’ve been taking them and what the range that you’ve been taking?

Jesse: Yeah. I probably first came across the idea of smart drugs even existing even they’re being a way to up modulate a person’s cognition maybe about nine years ago now. I wish I could remember the exact date. I remember I saw a little side bar article in Maxim magazine. It was talking about a drug called Provigil which is the trade name for Modafinil. It made it sound interesting. It said it was being used by computer programmers. I was a former computer programmer at that time and little did I know I had more computer programming in my future. I made an order from a Canadian pharmacy, had it shipped to me online. Did it without a prescription so I was, I guess that was the first ‘grey market’ internet order that I ever did. That started me down the path.

Jane: What’s quite clear from your answer was that different drugs have different effects, which must affect the times you need to take them. What’s the best time to take them?

Jesse: It really depends. It depends on the effects you’re going for. If you’re using something which is more of a stimulant and tends to be a wakefulness-promoting drug, you probably want to take it either early in the day so it’s not going to mess up your sleep later that night or if you’re using it as a sleep-avoidance tactic then take it whatever time you want but just be aware that there could be some ramifications to falling asleep quickly. On the other hand, there are drugs that people take as stimulant parachutes, things like Melatonin although that wouldn’t be considered as smart drug but if people that use these kind of interventions pretty aggressively, they have ways to get into and out of different cognitive states.

I can’t really say, you should take your smart drugs at 9AM because there’s just no hard and fast rule with things like that. A lot of them, it makes sense to be aware of maybe what other foods – whether you should take it on an empty stomach, whether you should take it with foods. For example, Aniracetam is a fat-soluble compound. It’s good to have a little bit of dietary fat when you take it and the Aniracetam pill because it just helps it get into your bloodstream more effectively. There’s all that stuff to be aware of but I can’t really give a blanket answer for what time of the day.

Jane: Sure. Have you personally had some bad experiences where you haven’t been able to sleep or you think, I shouldn’t have done that, what a mistake, have you had some bad times with it?

Jesse: I haven’t had anything that would be catastrophically bad but there have been a few times when I’ve taken Modafinil on three days in a row and then on the first day that I don’t take it, I just feel really, really tired, probably because I’ve been reducing my sleep needs on the three previous nights then you got to ‘pay the piper’. There’s things to be aware of there. If you’re taking drugs that really have strong effects on Dopamine, then oftentimes the body will start to produce less Dopamine itself naturally which can make you feel really, really rotten when you stop taking a Dopamine-enhancing drug and then go off of it. Those aren’t things I mess with too much. I don’t want to do anything to undercut my body’s own natural Dopamine production but if somebody is taking Adderall on prescription, that’s something they very much need to be aware of.

Jane: That’s an interesting point you raised actually is the more you know about the effects and how they work, the more you can be prepared

Jesse: Yeah. It’s like anything else. You’re riding a bicycle. Obviously, it’s great to know how to ride a bike but you’ll probably going to skin your knees a few times as you’re doing the learning process. You’re not going to get it right the first time you try. Most of these are not miracle pills that you take it, you’re in a newer, enhanced cognitive state and instantly everything works perfectly and you know how to behave in that state. It might be something where you feel the difference the first couple of times. You feel the changes in your natural productivities and you get a sense of when I’m in this mental state or in this particular chemical, here’s the type of things that I gravitate towards. Here’s what I do well. Here’s what I don’t do well.

One thing I’ve talked about a lot with people on focus-enhancing drugs is they tend to make whatever is in front of you more interesting even if it doesn’t necessarily merit your attention. That’s something that’s worth bearing in mind before you actually take the drug. If you have a bunch of stuff you want to get done, decide what those things are. Create your checklist at a strategic level of what needs to get done before taking this drug that’s going to make everything in front of you more interesting than it otherwise would be. Use the drugs as a tactical tool of, okay, I’ve already got my checklist. Now, I’m going to power through it rather than creating your checklist when you’re already in an altered state.
TMBA STING

Dan: I’ve got to jump in here because I’ve got some experience of drugs with these sorts of properties.

Ian: I’m getting amped-up just talking amphetamines right now.

Dan: (laughs) The way I’ve thought about is – if you’re going to take this stuff, you’ve got to make sure your wheels are set in the right direction before you hit the gas.

Ian: Right so the picture I’m getting here is: I’m in a very fast car and the wheel is cocked 45 degrees to the left and I hit the gas peddle, somewhat unexpectedly because it can come on unexpectedly and all of a sudden you’re doing doughnuts.

Dan: I know we’re in this brave new world of internet and technology and things but there’s a lot of wisdom in our bodies and often times when you engineer motivation, you miss out on the cues that your body is trying to say to you, like ‘hey this job sucks’, ‘this project sucks’. Oftentimes it’s a smarter strategy, rather than hitting that gas pedal and going in just whatever direction the wheels are set is thinking about – “what’s really going to get me motivated here?” And so that’s the challenge. And I’ve had days where I have very aggressively and intently watched ‘YouTube’ like an Allstar, I mean I was like managing my subscriptions and setting things up but I’ve also seen people do this for weeks/months and even years so it’s a serious thing.

Ian: In my experience you have to be careful and you have to be self-directed so I remember experimenting with things like this when I had to finish a 3D model and that was a great time because I had a clear vision and I had a clear path for what I needed to accomplish. I wasn’t sitting down in front of my computer – ‘how should I spend my day?’, pop a pill and all of a sudden I’m vacuuming for 4 hours. I’m sitting down, I’m thinking I have to finish this model, I’m not very motivated to do it, I know exactly what needs to happen but the truth is it’s going to take me 4 hours, let’s see if we can do it in 2 and be really excited about it.

Jane: One of the really interesting questions I thought that came up during your talk or after your talk was a woman who brought up the question of, how much do we know about the different effects on women and men, the gender difference which is a huge issue actually in medical science generally. What do you think about that?

Jesse: One thing that, I guess, I would love to put a little asterisk to my answer. There is one thing that I should have mentioned and I didn’t. I actually did know this but I just wasn’t thinking about it in the context of smart drugs is that Modafinil and its chemical family, they’re actually known to make birth control not work so well. If you’re on hormonal birth control and you take Modafinil, you can get that messed up. You might still get pregnant. That’s something that’s worth, obviously, being very, very aware of. Because of the way the question was phrased, I was thinking more in terms of does it have cognitive differences, that I’m not aware of but obviously getting unexpectedly pregnant when you think you’re on birth control would be worth knowing about.

I’m not sure as far as other gender differences in how these compounds work but I think person to person, there are huge differences. Something that might affect one person strongly may not have that much effect on somebody else. I think part of this is probably genetics and built-in physiology. I think a lot of it probably has to do with dietary and lifestyle choices. If you happen to be running low on a few compounds within your diet and you take a supplement that raise you back up to normal levels, you can feel a tremendous boost and think such and such supplement is amazing. But then somebody else who’s already getting those things from their diet might take the same supplement and feel absolutely nothing. It’s worth experimenting around a bit if somebody wants to get into these things. Make an exciting trip to the vitamin store, buy a lot of different things and see how, take things one by one, add them into and out of your diet and see if you notice a change.

Jane: I was interested that you said that you’ve done a survey. You’ve got this great podcast called ‘Smart Drugs Smarts’. I was into you said that you’ve done a survey. What did you learn about your listeners?

Jesse: I learned a bunch. I learned that we’re very skewed to male which unfortunately it’s just the case when you talk ‘science stuff’. I feel like there’s probably a little bit of an automatic skew that happens there which his unfortunate. I also learned that we have a very broad age range. We have people from probably about 20 years of age to about 85 years of age, I think, is the oldest that we got.

Jane: That’s amazing.

Jesse: Yeah. It was cool. I don’t even really think of people in their 80s as being aware that podcast exists but I was really happy to hear about that. One thing that I thought was, probably the biggest surprise of everything that we got back from that survey was that there’s a lot of listeners who really have not done any smart drugs at all per se, nothing more exotic than maybe fish oil or caffeine and yet they’re die-hard listeners. That was really surprising to me. I guess they’re into it for the neurology and neuroscience and some of the topics covered but some of the compounds that we talked about might seem too aggressive and out there for them to actually put them into their own mouths and bodies.

Jane: As we’re living older, as we’re living to be older, maybe we’re looking for ways to enhance the best quality of life for as long as possible.

Jesse: I think that the ability to take care of one’s brain is more important now than ever because as medical technology advances, if you have a liver that goes out or a lung that goes out or something like that, that’s a problem but it’s becoming less and less of one. I think that we’re going to be able to be 3D printing livers and have enhanced transplant technology and all those stuff for our worker organs. In the next, 10, 15, 20 years that technology is going to become cheaper, more effective and be able to replace pretty much any part of your body except your brain is going to be increasing in reality.

If we have the ability to have these long-term young bodies which I think is not as crazy as it might sound then it really behooves us to think the brain is the one thing that you can’t just swap out and have it still be you. So, it really does make sense to maintain the structural integrity of this most important of organs as much as a person possibly can.

Jane : Yeah and I think also just enhance the experience of your life as maybe your cognitive functions as you get older our memories decline a bit maybe they’re just interested in having a better quality of that aspect of their life as well.

Jesse: Yeah, yeah. Our brain is the perceptual organ through which we process our entire worlds of, the better we can make it feel about everything, the better our experience in life is going to be.

Jane: I notice you’ve been starting, promoting a range of supplements on your website and blog when I looked at it. I’m just interested to know how you went about formulating those and why, really?

Jesse:
Right now we’ve only got two products that we actually sell ourselves. We have a stack called ‘Nexus’ which is a cognitive stack based around Aniracetam and a second supplement stack is more physical in nature called ‘Mitogen’ which is specifically aimed at giving the biochemical precursors that are needed by the mitochondria which is the energy-manufacturing organelle within all of our body cells. Those two things are complimentary to one another. They don’t really step on one another’s toes. We might offer some more products in the future but those were the only two that we’re specifically selling for right now and that we’ve created. We’re still talking about a wide variety of other things both prescription and non-prescription on the actual episodes. We’ll be continuing to cover lots and lots of different topics.

Jane : How did you go about researching what was going to be in them?

Jesse: Partially, the podcast itself has been a research tool for that. We’re coming up on 98 episodes. We’ve talked with a bunch of different doctors and pharmacists and things like that. Of course, I’ve been trying some of these compounds along the way. I haven’t tried everything that we’ve had on the show but I’ve tried probably a good healthy majority of them. Probably, the primary decision was what do we build this stack around? For me and Aniracetam, it was the choice there, I like the long-term neuroprotective properties of that chemical. I like the fact that for me it’s a palpable creativity boost.

We said, if we want to build a stack around Aniracetam, what might be some complimentary compounds? We wound up selecting three others, Phosphatidylserine, Citicoline and Pycnogenol and basically found a formula for those, discover that we could actually get a useful formula that still fit into a couple of pills, didn’t have to be a horse-pill-size thing and went off to the races and put that together. That was something that we started. It started, I guess, thinking about what the formula might be in the early part of 2015 and we’re able to actually put that out for sale in early July.

Jane: You talk to great specialists on your podcast but you yourself don’t have any pharmaceutical or medical training which you’re very open about. How do you feel about that?

Jesse: I’m certainly learning as I go. I feel like I’m getting a broad-spectrum medical training from talking with so many different people and of course doing a lot of reading on the sides and stuff like that. I do a lot of reading and prep work for each of my interviews. In a non-course focused way, I have been doing a lot of learning in this area for the last three years. I’m not particularly worried about that. It’s like Larry King interviews a whole lot of politicians and knows how countries are run and states are run and things like that without having gone through whatever political training he has. [inaudible 00:20:38] European company, we need to go for it. I don’t think that makes him worse of an interviewer. I think that I’m certainly perfectly qualified to do these sorts of interviews I do as a very interested lay person.

Jane: Have you ever felt, has anybody ever made you feel like that you don’t really know what you’re talking about or they’re just quite the …

Jesse: Not really. The thing is most doctors are hyperfocused on one particular depth of expertise like I’m a foot doctor. I know everything there is to know about feet but if you come to them with tonsillitis, they might not be able to help you all that much. It’s not like a hundred years ago where the knowledge base in medicine is so shallow that somebody can be a broad-spectrum expert. Medical professionals today know their particular region extremely deep but across specialties, there just isn’t enough time for everybody to learn everything. Even were I do stop what I’m doing, take six years and get a medical degree. I would still only be learning one particular branch of medicine and instead of just taking the approach of trying to learn as much as I can about a variety of things that can help the brain.

Jane: One thing, the drugs we take today, again, you’re very open about this on your website is. You’ve just been taking them for 20 years. We don’t really know the full consequences they may have in the future in our bodies. Is that something that concerns you?

Jesse: Short answer, no. If it’s not showing any bad results after five years of FDA testing and it’s been on the market for 10 or 20 years and technically yeah, there could be a 40-year ‘time bomb’ hidden in there somewhere but I don’t really have any actual examples in the history of medicine of something that have seemed all right for a couple of decades and then blew up. There might be some examples of that in the cases of vaccinations. All the drugs that I’ve taking or fall under this rubric have been in the past 10 years or so. It certainly hasn’t been when I’ve been a kid. I just don’t think there’s too much to worry about there. I’m really careful about my health. I watch my diet. I exercise. I think, as I said, a second-generation health nut after my dad. I don’t even drink alcohol. I figured if to any extent that I’m being devil may care or cavalier with some of the neurological compounds that I take, I feel like I’m cutting my wrist in other areas by doing all the right stuff for my body.

Jane : Sure. It’s all about choices, right?

Jesse: Yeah.

Jane: I’m interested in, just reading about some of the things you’ve done. I’m interested in – you seem quite drawn to pushing the limits or extremes of behavior like you cycled across the US to see if you could do it. You went vegan for a year and then switched to Paleo. Is this part of it? Is that part of your personality?

Jesse: Yeah. I think I am drawn to the extremes. I like seeing where the edges are. That great quote, ‘until you’ve gone too far, you don’t know how much enough is’. I am a believer in that. Yeah. I’m a naturally curious person and I like walking up to the edge and seeing what it looks like from there.

Jane: Everything I’ve read that you’ve written and done and just listening to your shows – you obviously do research things and you’re really interested in reading and finding out about what’s happening. Are there any resources that you would direct people to that are interested in finding out about this?

Jesse: Obviously, I would love it if anybody wants to give a listen to the podcast. We come out weekly on Fridays. We talk to a variety of experts about things related to the brain. Probably about 50% of the episodes are talking about pharmacological compounds, things you actually put in your mouth. We talk about things like transcranial direct-current stimulation, the brain zappers that people wear on the outside of their heads. We talk about some of the ethical issues involved in human enhancement and how society should be aware of some of the downstream consequences of the things and the things that would be coming available in the next couple of years.

There’s Aeon Magazine, I believe that’s, I’m not really sure if I’m pronouncing that right but it’s A-E-O-N magazine online. I’m not sure if they have an offline component to them but they have a bunch of really interesting articles in some of these related areas. A lot of them, there’s a big crossover between the smart drugs community which is also known -the word Nootropics is something that people will certainly be aware of – between the Nootropics community and the Futurism community who’re thinking of how are things like artificial intelligence going to affect society. The variety of technological upgrades, they’re starting to grow as methodically more powerful. How are these things going to affect the world?

There’s a whole lot of writing going on on that right now and no lack of places to look in. If somebody is to Google Futurism, they’re going to find a ton of interesting reading but Wired Magazine is another great major media source that a lot of people would have heard of.

Jane: It’s really visions of the future isn’t it, really? Where do you see the future of these kinds of drugs going? How do you see that they may develop?

Jesse: I think we’re in a great time for it now because we’re gaining so much more ability to watch the brain in real time as it processes information without, we’re not just slicing open dead brains anymore and making, after the fact, guesses about how things will work. We’re able to see the brain just with increasing resolution in real time both spatial resolution and time resolution as it does these extremely complex, high-speed processes. That’s going to give us a heck of a lot more information than we’ve ever had before. We’re also benefiting from the fact that as baby boomers get older, they’re starting to enter those years where they can really experience cognitive declines and are willing to spend money and research dollars and all these things to maintain their cognition for as long as they can.

As I mentioned, a lot of the things that we’re using on smart drugs now were developed to really protect the brain as they fade later in life. I think there will be some big follow-on benefits for all of society, young people as well as old people because of the increasing number of old people in that baby boomer generation. Finally, I think that just in the past few years, there seems to have been a general lightening of the prohibition against doing studies into psychedelic compounds, things like MDMA and LSD, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. If medical professionals are able to start really studying these drugs, how they affect the brain both the good and the bad aspects of that, I think there’s probably a heck of a lot of potential for non-recreational psychedelics and specifically-designed psychedelic pharmaceuticals for a lack of a better term that we just haven’t really been able to approach scientifically for the last 30, 35 years because of all the legal prohibitions against it.

TMBA STING

Dan: Bossman, we’re back. I mean we’re just floating in time. You can’t do this without smart drugs.

Ian: I can’t feel my hands, I can’t feel my face.

Dan: I’d like to thank Jesse for coming on the show and for giving such a great presentation at DCBKK too. I think it’s fascinating to take a step back and look at what Jesse’s done with his podcast, I think 3 or 4 years ago he was an enthusiast. He’s one of the healthiest, hardest working, most articulate people that I’ve ever met but he wasn’t an expert in smart drugs. He wasn’t someone who was developing products or talking to Harvard neuroscientists and now he’s being considered a real leader in the field. And he used the microphone, an online platform to seek out those things that are of interest to him. I think that what he’s doing is having a real positive impact. You know he’s asking hard questions, he’s doing interviews, he’s bringing this information to light and I think it’s really powerful. He’s just a smart guy with a microphone.

Ian: That and he is an adult advocating drugs. So thank you for that.

Dan: (laughs) We’d love to hear your ideas of how you’d like to see the future. What do you guys think the future of this Smart Drugs Smarts thing is? We’d love to hear your comments on the show. As always you can come to tropicalmba.com and give us a comment.

Ian: Any samples you’d like to send along to us.
Dan: That’s right. We will sample them.

Ian: We will maybe forward them to Jesse, maybe just take it ourselves.

Dan: Thanks for tuning in and we’ll be back next Thursday morning at 8amEST.

Listen to this week’s show and learn:

What the term “Smart Drugs” actually means. (3:30)

The different types of Smart Drugs that are available on the market today. (5:52)

TL;DR: This is not a ringing endorsement. This episode is problematic, and should be redacted ASAP.

Generally speaking, I love the show, and I am a loyal subscriber. You both provide me with much needed inspiration and guidance as I hack this solo-preneurship thing without any previous experience. I hold you both in the highest regard for your accomplishments and for your dedication.

Having said that, what I am about to articulate is vital to the health and welfare of our fellow TMBAers. So vital, in fact, I have also emailed this letter to you.

In the closing portions of this letter, I cite some authoritative sources to which you should refer. For the benefit of your credibility, and for the health of your audience, I hope to see an expedited issuance of errata, and the prompt redaction of this episode.

The episode TMBA315 is an extreme disappointment, to say the least. You recklessly wandered out of your field of expertise, and way off the reservation, and as a result are complicit in the spread of pseudo-quack-science that may cause harm to your audience.

The sole credential of this episode’s guest, as given by Dan, is “he’s a smart guy with a microphone”. The “smart guy”, Jesse Lawler, by his own admission, when pressed by the interviewer, does not believe formal training in the field of medicine would benefit his career. That may be true enough, as he’s essentially nothing more than an entertainer, but it does severely downgrade his credibility to speak with any authority on this complex topic.

At issue here is Mr. Lawler’s stated assertion that FDA testing is reliable, and, in the case of new drugs, we should not be concerned with the lack of testing. His position is understandable, given that he derives his information solely from persons who profit from the distribution of these substances.

It is at this point that I will state quite simply as a matter of fact that, from its very inception, the FDA has a documented and extensive history of corruption, which includes an open and incestuous relationship with big-pharma. It surprises me that you are not already aware of this, as I had you both pegged for having surely been “red-pilled” (I’ve heard you both, on numerous occasions, bemoan the state of affairs in the USA).